Riding Lessons

by Jane Smiley

  So I gave her a smack, and then another one, and then we walked on, but I had a plan. For the last ten minutes of the ride, we went into Abby’s arena and did some “flat work,” which is just turning and stopping and starting and trotting and walking, and Sissy did finally wake up and do her job, so it was more fun than the trail ride. I watched Ned out of the corner of my eye, and he wandered in our direction, taking bites of grass along the way, but all the time curious, all the time saying, “I want to meet you!” You could tell he was a Thoroughbred just by the way he walked, all smooth and soft but covering a lot of ground, completely different from Gee Whiz, who has the longest legs you can imagine and seems to be powered by a big engine, but related in the way you think that any moment either one of them might just rise off the ground and fly away.

  By this time, I was talking on and on, as I usually do, and of course I asked about him, and Abby said that he is a four-year-old, that he had five starts and was in the money three times, but now his racing career is finished. In his last race, he strained a tendon, and so had to take a vacation, but because of what the jockey said, they decided to retire him. What the jockey said was that they were in the front of the pack, coming around the turn, and all of a sudden, Ned spit the bit and stopped trying, let all the other horses pass him, and when they crossed the finish line, he was just cantering along and looking around as though he were on vacation. The jockey was smart enough not to hit him, and when he jumped off, the trainer ran out and felt Ned’s legs, and there was a little warmth in the right front, but only a little. A good racehorse, a racehorse who really wants to win, would have ignored whatever happened, and maybe injured himself worse, but Ned is too smart to be a racehorse (Abby and I both laughed at that), and so his job now is to recover from his little injury and try something else and maybe he won’t be too smart for that. Abby said, “We’ll see. Sometimes they are just too smart for their own good.” And she looked right at me.

  I walked around while Abby did a few things with Gee Whiz. He isn’t ready to show yet—she has only been jumping him for two months. He needs about ten million more circles to the left and the right and a lot of backing up and a lot of stepping over to make him pay attention and not take the bit in his mouth and do it his way. He was a racehorse for seven years and won a lot of money and ran in dozens of races, and so, according to Abby, he thinks he knows everything, and sometimes he gallops so fast that she gets tears in her eyes from the speed and starts feeling like she is on a train. He needs to learn that he doesn’t have to do that anymore, but Abby likes him so much that she is ready to take the time, and she said, “Anyway, Blue spoiled me rotten, and so I have to get over that.”

  After we got off and untacked the horses and brushed them down and led them to their pastures, Abby handed me half a carrot and said, “Hide it,” and we walked over to the fence, a few yards from where Ned was grazing. Abby put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Just wait. Don’t do anything.” And so we waited. I held the carrot next to my leg on the side away from Ned. The first thing Ned did was look at us, ears pricked. His mane kind of stands up and his forelock is short. He flicked his ears, then went back to eating grass, or rather, to eating some wildflowers that were in the grass. He picked them out very thoroughly, as if he were cleaning his plate. When he was finished, he snorted and looked at us. He wasn’t talking to me. Finally, he stepped toward us, as if he had nothing better to do. Abby didn’t offer her carrot, so I didn’t offer mine. She said, “If he comes to us without us offering him anything, then that means he’s been treated kindly.” He got to us, paused, then put his head over the fence. Abby lifted her hand and ran her fingers gently around first one eye and then the other eye, and said, “Hello, Ned.” She moved back half a step. I reached up and did the same. The hair on his face was smooth and silky. After I had done it for a minute, he closed his eyes and let out some air. Then Abby put her hand under his mane and petted him down the neck. Finally, we gave him the carrot halves. As she was giving him her half, Abby petted the side of his nose first and then slowly brought the carrot up to his lips. If he reached too quickly, she pulled her hand away but didn’t stop petting the side of his nose. The second time, he was more careful, stretched his upper lip and took the carrot politely. When I offered him my carrot, I did the same thing, and I could feel the fuzzy warmth of his lip on the palm of my hand. After the carrots were gone, we petted his cheeks and his nose and his neck. Abby said, “The only thing I’ve really done to train him so far is stand on both sides of him and pet him from his face to his tail until he either puts his head down or walks away. Usually, he puts his head down and I’m the one to walk away. I think that’s a good sign.”

  I thought all of this was incredibly relaxing, and I was ready to lie down in the grass and take a nap. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dad standing by the barn with his hands on his hips, and I knew that he wanted to go home and have his lunch and, furthermore, that it is a long drive. By the time we were in the car, backing around to head out of Oak Valley Ranch, I had pretty much forgotten about my ride on Sissy, and was thinking only of Ned.

  When I went to bed that night, and Mom asked me when she was tucking me in how my lesson was, I even said that it was great before I remembered that it wasn’t great. But anyway.

  I, of course, did not take a picture of Ned because Dad didn’t bring his camera, but in school on Monday, after I finished my division problems, instead of doing my backward alphabet to pass the time, I turned over my answer sheet and drew two pictures of Ned’s head and neck. The second one was better than the first, but I thought the first one had a better eye. Then, of course, we had to pass our papers to the end of the row, but Miss Cranfield is pretty nice, and I thought she wouldn’t mind the pictures. She might even like them because they would be a break from the boredom of checking division answers. I also didn’t mind turning them in, because I knew that when I got them back on Wednesday, I would be able to see if the ones I had drawn between now and then had gotten better or not.

  Here are my favorite things for dinner—minute steak with gravy, mashed potatoes, broccoli with browned butter, homemade rolls, and lemon tarts from the bakery. That night, we had all of those, and also Mom put a cloth on the table and a little vase of some tulips from the garden. It had been sunny all day, and Mom was in a good mood. I thought this was because Dad had decided to put off going out on the road until Tuesday morning, which he sometimes does if he’s had a good week the week before. But really, they were softening me up, as if I didn’t know what was going on, getting me in a good mood. When I was eating my lemon tart, Mom said, “Ellen, we have something to tell you,” and I did not say, “Yes, I know you are going to have a baby,” because if I did, then I would have to say that I had seen the baby name book in her drawer, because I opened it looking for a safety pin.

  Dad cleared his throat, and they both sat there smiling, and I ate two more bites of my lemon tart, and Mom said, “You are hungry tonight! Good for you!”

  So I smiled and said that the mashed potatoes were really yummy. Just as I pressed the edge of my fork into the last part of the lemon tart, Mom said, “We want to tell you something. That you are going to have a sister.” Then Mom and Dad looked at each other, and I had one-half of a thought—how did she know already that the baby was a girl?—and then Dad said, “There is something else we have to tell you, and maybe we should have told you this a while ago, but it’s always hard to know when.”

  And then they didn’t say anything for a long time. I finished my lemon tart, chewed it to the last piece and swallowed it, and had a drink of water, and Mom said, “Well, Ellen, the new baby is coming—or rather, we are going to get her—in about a week.”

  “Where are you going to get her?”

  “At the adoption agency in San Jose.”

  And, you know, for once in my life, I did not put two and two together. I just sat there. Finally, Dad said, �
��The same place where we had the good luck to get you, on the best day of our lives.” He gave me a big smile, and Mom reached over and squeezed my hand. And then I put two and two together, and understood that I am adopted.

  I guess we talked about this for the next couple of hours, off and on. The main part of the story was that Mom and Dad really wanted a baby and tried really hard, but they could never have a baby. In the meantime, there are women, but they are girls, actually, something like sixteen years old or so, who do have babies, but they don’t have the money to support them, and so they give them up for adoption, knowing that they will be loved and cared for in good homes. All of the information about where the baby came from and who ends up with the baby is secret forever—the new parents don’t know who the mother and father were but they are very grateful for the mother being so generous to the baby and to them. The mother doesn’t know where the baby went, and sometimes the baby can go a long way, but all of that is guessing, and it is better not to guess, but to look to the future, and know that the baby and the little girl and the new family will have a great life together.

  Dad started talking about how this was a lot better than the old way, which was that lots of children lived in orphanages (I thought of his friend Jimmy Murphy, who he shot the beavers with, and maybe that was why he told me that story), but then Mom gave him a look, and he said we could talk about that another time. There are plenty of books about orphanages and orphans, though, and some of them are in my bookcase, so when I went up to my room after a while, I sat there and looked at them. Two of them are Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. I read both of those around Christmas. There is also a cartoon in the paper called Little Orphan Annie, but I never read that, because Annie has no eyeballs, which is creepy. Snow White is an orphan and Cinderella is an orphan and Bambi is an orphan. The boy in a movie I saw, The Sword in the Stone, whose name was Wart, was an orphan. I watched that movie and read those books, and never once thought that I might be an orphan. But then, I am not an orphan. I have Mom and I have Dad, and I have this room and this house, and I can walk to Grandma Lydia and Grandpa John’s anytime I want to, and all of them hug me and sometimes kiss me. I am not an orphan. I didn’t take any of the orphan books off the shelf. I took down The Bobbsey Twins at Home, which I have read so many times that the back of the book broke off and had to be taped on again, and I started to read it. The last time I read it was last summer, when I was wishing that I had a twin or at least was not an only child, and here in a week, I will stop being an only child.

  I was almost to the end of the second chapter when Mom came in to put me to bed. She smiled and didn’t say anything about me being adopted; she just got some clean pajamas out of my drawer and turned back the quilt on my bed, then she stood there smiling while I cleaned my teeth, then she brushed my hair because if she doesn’t, the tangles will be terrible in the morning, and it will be hard to get all the stuff done that we have to do before school. She knows that I know that she knows that I know that if I want to wear my hair long and not in braids or pigtails, the way I used to, I have to let her brush it twice a day, and so I do.

  Once she’d tucked me in and turned on the night-light beside the door, she came back and sat on my bed. She said, “This has been a big day.” Then she leaned down toward me and kissed me on the cheek, and she said in a soft voice, “After every big day, there is another day, and all the things that seemed big on that big day start getting smaller and smaller, until they are just regular things like everything else.”

  I said, “What are you going to name the baby?”

  “We’re going to name her Joan, which is a form of Johanna, after my aunt.”

  “What about her middle name?” My middle name is Rachel, which is just a name that my mom always liked.

  “Ariel.”

  I had never heard of this name before, but I said, “That’s a nice name. Joan Ariel Leinsdorf.”

  Looking at my mom there, with the starlight coming in the window, made me think two things—that I knew what a mom was and that I didn’t know what a mom was—both at the same time. It was a funny feeling. She smoothed my hair back off my forehead and kissed me again, and then said, “I love you, Ellen. Go to sleep now.”

  After she left, I lay on my back, and that was when Ned started to talk to me for the first time. He was in the middle of the pasture, under some trees, all by himself. It was dark, and he was dark, too, so I couldn’t see him very well. Then he turned his head, and I saw the little white strip and the glint of some sort of light on his shiny coat. He started pawing the ground, then he turned in a little circle, then he lay down and rolled, throwing his legs around and rubbing his back into the grass. After that, he stood up and shook himself, snorted, and said, “Do you have a pasture for me?”

  I said, “I only have a garden. It is way too small for a horse.”

  “How big is it?”

  “About the size of two stalls.”

  “I liked my stall at the racetrack. I don’t really understand why I am here.”

  I said, “You hurt yourself in a race and they retired you.”

  “That is embarrassing.”

  “Do you remember hurting yourself?”

  “I remember a hurt. There was a soft spot in the ground and I stepped right into it because the chestnut horse was pushing at me.”

  “He pushed you?”

  “No. He pinned his ears and leaned toward me with his shoulder, and I leaned away from him and stepped in the hole.”

  I said, “Was he cheating?”

  He said, “He knew what he was doing.”

  “Did the jockey know what the horse was doing?”

  “Jockeys never know what we are doing.”

  That made me laugh.

  Then he said, “These horses here think I’m a baby. They’re always pinning their ears and picking up a back foot. That means ‘Go away.’ ”

  I said, “What about Gee Whiz?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The bigger gray.”

  “He’s the worst. He thinks he is a stallion, he is so full of himself. He’s always saying how he could jump out of the pasture, but he never does.”

  “Abby says he got out a couple of times, and also, he had dozens of starts.”

  “He already told me that.”

  “Abby likes you.”

  “She gives me a carrot sometimes. But all day long and all night long, I just stand around here. It’s boring.”

  I said, “I know just what you mean.”

  And then he shook his head and ambled away. It was like he was walking away from the microphone or something. I had the sense that there was only one place in the pasture where he could talk to me. Until I fell asleep, I thought about his face and his short little forelock, and his shiny coat. I imagined doing what Abby does, which is to pet him from front to back, first the left side, and then the right side.

  When I got home from school the next day, our house was already different. There was a bassinet in the guest room, and also a crib, for later, and on the mattress of the crib there was a stack of baby outfits, and another stack with diapers. Next to the crib was a diaper bucket (I know what this is—the diaper man drives up our street once a week, to pick up the dirty diapers and drop off the clean ones). Mom told me that Joan Ariel is already a week old—by the time we have her, she will be two weeks old. On the kitchen stove was a big pot, and inside it was a rack full of baby bottles. You sterilize them by boiling them for ten or fifteen minutes. After she put the roast in the oven, Mom took me into her room and sat me down on the bed, then she brought out a pink book and opened it. It was my baby book, and there they were, pictures of Mom in a white hat and a light-colored jacket, and Dad in a shirt and tie, and Mom was smiling—she had me in her arms. I was very strange-looking—eyes closed and dark hair all over my head, bundled up in a blanket. Fir
st, they were standing in a doorway with some woman, and then they were walking down some steps, and then they were standing with Grandma and Grandpa in front of our house, and Mom was giving me a kiss on the forehead. I had never seen these photos before—the only baby picture I had seen was of when I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree. I don’t know why I never asked why that was the only one. I said, “I hope Joan Ariel is cuter than I was,” which made Mom laugh and kiss me, and she said, “Don’t see how that could possibly happen.”

  On Wednesday, we had to give a report in reading class. I thought I was going to give a report about my riding lesson—that’s what I always give reports about, unless I am assigned a book—but at the last minute, I stood up at the front of the room and said that I was getting a new sister in five days, that my mom and dad are adopting her, that she lives in San Jose, and that I am adopted, too, and then all these kids were staring at me, until Ruthie Creighton—whom I don’t think I’ve ever talked to because she is as quiet as a mouse and always stays in the corner, and if she is going to go on the swings or climb the jungle gym, she only does it when she’s by herself—said, “I’m adopted,” and then everyone turned their heads and looked at her. Miss Cranfield said, “Thank you, Ellen, for your report.” She smiled, first at me, then at Ruthie. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Let’s see. All right, children. Marilyn Cooper, is your report ready?” Marilyn’s report was about going to Disneyland. Her favorite ride was the Matterhorn. I happen to know that the Matterhorn is in Switzerland.